Quotes About Perception

Why did one have to put up a hue and cry about anything so trifling as the skin on one's face, which, after all, was only a small part of the human capsule? ... While such a situation would be understandable in a pimply adolescent who lives in visions, it was ridiculous for me, the section head of a respectable laboratory, moored securely to this world by an anchor-like weight, to be afflicted by psychological hives.

I can hardly believe that the face is so important to a man's existence. A man's worth should be gauged by the content of his work; possibly the convolutions of the surface of the brain have something to do with it, but his face certainly does not. If the loss of a face can cause conspicuous change in the scale of evaluation, it may well be owing to a fundamental emptiness of content.

Then, suddenly, as if the floor of time had slipped away...

The fact has been made clear that your face—the mobile, harmonious type—was a mask too. In short, we are two spots of the same ink. It was not solely my responsibility.

Vaguely, I began to regret having come. Institute sounded respectable enough, but this was the kind of setup some neighborhood practitioner might choose.

The pleasure of deceiving would fade to a shadow before the anxiety of being deceived.

le visage est le pont jeté entre le moi et celui des autres

the one who best understands the significance of light is not the electrician, not the painter, not the photographer, but the man who has lost his sight in adulthood.

Wouldn't it be common sense to ask at once what I meant, without brooding over it?

Being a clown would be all right, but I did not want to be a clown unaware that he was one.

When he saw the vista of the street reflected in the mirror in which he was looking, he was terror stricken. He had the impression that the whole view had turned into eyes that reproached him.

Life wouldn't be easier or not easier. Aren't both generalizations logically impossible? Since there's no correlation, there can be no comparison.

what cheered me most was to watch the girl quietly playing with her yoyo in the shadow of the emergency stairs, unseen by anyone but me. She was burdened with a great misfortune that she could not perceive as misfortune. She did not know how much luckier she was than the rest of mankind aware of unhappiness.

She seemed to be wearing frozen fish bladders for shoes. But

I fixed my eyes in the vicinity of the yellowish-brown darned spot around the little green button at your breast.

I couldn't see you, no matter how I tried, if you moved around like a jellyfish.

What a surprise attack. To imagine that you perceived that my mask was a mask and nevertheless went on pretending to be deceived.

just as, in the dark, one sees only darkness whether one keeps his eyes open or shut, looks right or left.

I was dazzled perhaps by the double aspect of the mask—was it the negation of my real face or actually a new face?—and I had been obliged to take an unavoidably circuitous road because I had forgotten the essential point that even this daze was a form of action.

it doesn't follow that all bearded men are bullies or heroes. There's the fortuneteller's beard, the Lenin cut, or again the European aristocrat's. And then there's the Castro beard and what is apparently the latest style—the beards sported by youngsters posing as artists, but just what that is called I don't know.

When the sister said that the sea was expressionless, the brother answered that that was not true at all, that it was the best of talkers.

I could make nothing of the terribly vague answers I got, which I could believe or doubt as I liked.

imagining the scene when I would confront you who were the symbol of "the others.

The former were trompe l'œil doors painted on a wall, but the mask was like a door ajar, through which the fragrance of sunlight is wafted in.